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Quick Swing Through Oak BluffsAugust 27, 2005 . . . to pick up a few groceries at Reliable and beer at Our Market. Summer is fading: parking places were, if not exactly plentiful, then at least not scarce, and checkout lines were short. Saw two noteworthy bumper stickers. On the backside of Reliable, in the loading zone outside the O.B. post office where it's legal to park when they're not loading, was Critical Thinking: Our Other National Deficit. In the barely half full Our Market lot was Bush Sent Us to Iraq to Find WMDs but All We Found Were These Lousy Bumper Stickers. Ribbons were out in their customary profusion. My grasp of the color code is shaky: I do know that pink is for breast cancer (saw a few of those) and I think red is for AIDS (didn't see any of those), and yellow usually has Support Our Troops written on it. No matter what war's on, "Support Our Troops" is the tricky one. In the anti-Vietnam War movement, we sang "Support our boys in Vietnam / Bring 'em home, bring 'em home," but at some point the moral and political hair-splitting yields a tangled mess of contradictions and every song and slogan sounds like a cop-out. In another time and place, some people would be writing letters and sending care packages to our boys and girls clerking at the concentration camps: "You may not believe in what they're doing, but they're a long way from home and this internment policy isn't their fault. Forced labor? Extermination? Who told you that? Your commie friends?" Right. And pretty soon you're talking about war and U.S. foreign policy as if they were hurricanes and tsunamis: natural disasters that mere humans have no control over. That's what I love about good ol' rugged individualism: we demand the right to buy potato chips instead of Cheez Doodles and to park in the handicapped space if we're in a hurry and we're only going to be there five minutes, but when it comes to serious ethical decisions about what we do for a living, it's all "ours is not to reason why -- support our troops." Same goes for women pulling down high-six-figure salaries at reprehensible corporations: Support Our Sisters? Don't think so. The Martha's Vineyard Times recently interviewed yet another local boy home from the war. The article was as embarrassing as most of its predecessors. The Times doesn't interview two-week vacationers about the ins-and-outs of island politics; why does it assume that a U.S. soldier is worth quoting without comment about the debacle in Iraq? Because we're supposed to be supporting our troops, and comments -- especially politically and historically informed comments, which almost inevitably are going to be at least a tad critical -- are not considered supportive. They probably won't make the soldier or his family and friends feel good. Support Our Troops? The more I think about Critical Thinking: Our Other National Deficit, the better I like it.
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